Meetups

With a lot of help from some friends, I started the Cape Town chapter of RailsBridge: an organisation that offers free workshops on Rails, Ruby, and other web technologies for groups of people that are underrepresented in tech. From April 2013 until March 2018, I helped organise and mentor at the quarterly workshops.

Projects

I think that a great way to test the robustness and resilience of your site is to play with it on lower-end mobile devices. I joined the Open Device Lab community by starting the Nomad Device Lab in September 2012. It’s a shared pool of internet-connected devices, and is free to use. Every few months someone will contact me through the site and I’ll go and sit with them, usually for a half a day. We test their projects across a range of devices, and discuss ways of improving the front-end performance and user experience. In November 2016, the lab was featured on Smashing Mag: Where Are The World’s Best Open Device Labs?

I’m a big believer in building things that are Future Friendly, so I made a tiny site to join the call to arms. You can read more about the technical details of what that means on my How I Do Things page.

Workshops and speaking

I love helping people learn new things, or get better at things they already known. I like sharing what I learn, so I give talks at local meetups and conferences. Here are some workshops I’ve helped design and run, and some talks I’ve given, this year.